AdSense is to entice visitors to click or view the ads that appear on your page. That only happens, though, if the ads are appealing to visitors. Having the right content is the key to having the right ads.
The technology behind Google AdSense — Web crawlers, spyders, and bots diligently scouring the World Wide Web for info — tries its best to determine the content of your site, but it ain’t perfect. If all the articles on one page refer to grading diamonds and other gemstones, the ads that are pushed to your page for display will (more likely than not) feature loose diamonds and
gemstones or diamond and gemstone jewelry. (Duh!) If you have a thing for free association so that articles on any given page jump from one topic to another with no cohesion, AdSense will have a much harder time placing relevant ads on your page. You could end up with ads for frog food when your site is related to planning a wedding at the lake. Try to keep your page as
cohesive as possible and don’t combine topics on a page if you can help it. Google uses the same technology to index your pages for search results that it uses to examine your pages to determine the most relevant ads. To improve ad targeting for your site, you can do some things that are designed to pique the interest of the Google indexers, like using keywords in your content and in the design of your site.
Piquing the interest of Google indexers has become a science in its own right — the science of search engine optimization. SEO, as it is referred to by those in the know, has tried to come up with a set of Web design principles that deal with everything from choosing content to actual structure to help search engines more easily analyze your site to determine where in the
search results it fits best. One of the most basic elements of SEO is how the content on your site is formatted. Assuming your content is mostly text, the titles and headings of your text are important. Including keywords — words that indicate the topic of your site — in titles and headings as well as a few times in the text of the articles you’re using, is one way to ensure that a search engine crawler will properly classify your site.
The most important principle behind SEO involves making sure that you design your Web site so that it’s both useful and relevant to visitors. Site visitors will come to your site either by conducting a search for a specific topic or by directly typing your Web address into the address bar of their browser. If you design your Web site with the intent of providing something the visitor needs, search crawlers are more likely to classify your site properly. As an
added bonus, you’ll probably also end up ranking higher in the search results. I have lots more on SEO in webpages, but for now, the most you need to know is that if you apply the same techniques that you would to optimizing your Web site for search engines, your AdSense ads will be spot on. In Figure C3, you can see how content can be placed around AdSense ad units to provide users with what they need and to feed the Google crawler so that ads are properly targeted.
Figure C3
You may say it’s just not enough to be told that the Google crawler knows
its stuff when it comes to pushing content-specific ads to your site. It may not even be the content that you’re worried about. The big questions for you might be “Where will the ad lead?” or “How will it look after you put it on your site?” Sometimes you just want to see for yourself, and that’s fine. Just don’t make the mistake of clicking your own ads. Instead, use the AdSense preview tool to see what kind of ads will be returned for your site. (You can download
the preview tool at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10005&topic=160.) When you find the file, follow these steps to download and install it:
1. Right-click the AdSense preview tool filename.
2. In the menu that appears, select Save and then save the file to your desktop.
3. When the download is complete, double-click the file to open it.
4. In the confirmation dialog box that appears (see Figure C4), click Yes. The program does its installation thing, usually quite quickly.
Figure C4
5. When the Successful Install confirmation message appears, click OK.
6. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to the site whose ads you want to preview. Sorry, this doesn’t work with Firefox or other browsers.
7. Right-click inside the page but not inside the ad unit.
8. In the menu that appears, select Google AdSense Preview Tool, as shown in Figure C5.
A list of the ads showing on your site appears.
9. Click the link for each ad to be taken to the advertisers’ Web sites, or place a check mark in the check box beside each ad and click Show Selected URLs to see the Web addresses the ads lead to.
Section targeting
In AdSense terminology, section targeting is a method of ad placement that allows advertisers to decide where on a page they want their ads displayed. If it turns out that you have ad space available in that place on the page, and if your page is related to the topic of the ad, the ad can be placed on your site. (I use can be because you probably won’t be the only publisher that meets
the requirements the advertiser sets forth, and the ad can be placed on any site that meets said requirements.) Ads rotate, so an ad may appear on your site one day and not the next.
Advertisers’ budgets also vary, and that’s another determining factor on where and how often you may see the ad.
Figure C5
You’ll encounter two types of section targeting:
* Contextual: Uses such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the Web site to determine what a Web page is about and to precisely match ads to each page.
* Placement: Advertisers choose specific ad placements — sections of specific Web sites they’ve take a shine to — on which to run their ads. Ads that are placement-targeted may not exactly jive with the content of your page, but they’re hand-picked by advertisers who believe there’s
a match between what your users are interested in and what the advertiser is advertising. For the privilege of making these specific choices, the advertiser pays a slightly higher fee. As a publisher, you benefit because you’ll be paid every time someone comes to your site and sees
the ad rather than by the number of times the ad is clicked. Using RSS feeds for content
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way of delivering news stories, articles, blog entries, and other types of content to subscribers by way of an e-mail or a content aggregator — a program that collects RSS feeds and delivers them all to a single location. Think of RSS like a newspaper delivered to your home. You don’t have to go out to get every single story in a newspaper. You subscribe to the paper, the reporters do all the legwork, the publisher puts all their stories together in one package, and a delivery guy brings it right to your front door. An RSS feed is an electronic version of a newspaper. The most important aspect of RSS feeds is that they deliver fresh content as often as it’s available. If you’re trying to put fresh content on your Web site
to improve your AdSense revenues, that’s huge. It’s more content, less work, and Google loves it. Wait. I can hear your objection. It’s not plagiarism or copyright infringement.
Content owners who put their content out via RSS feeds want that content to be distributed to as many readers as possible. You still need to ensure that the content is attributed properly, but as long as you do, you should have no problem using RSS feeds to add content to your Web site.
You do have to consider a couple logistical problems when using RSS, though. One problem is that RSS feeds don’t always deliver full articles. The content owner — the person or company that publishes the article, news story, blog, or other type of content — can set how much of his content he wants delivered through the RSS feed. That means you may only get about
250 characters delivered (which is usually about a paragraph). Some RSS feeds (the Google Reader, for example) link the titles of feeds to a pop-up window. When you click the title, the window pops up for you to read the feed. Because the bots and spyders Google uses won’t be doing that clicking, they probably can’t associate the RSS content with your Web site.
The way feeds are displayed varies from reader to reader. What’s more, the feed display (or a feed reader) isn’t likely to be customizable, adding yet another wrinkle to your plan to let someone else do all the hard work. If you’ve embedded an RSS feed on your Web site to help generate fresh, new content, having only 250 words of an article can be a real problem because
it’s hard to place relevant AdSense ads around that content. Even when the full article is available, feed readers often interfere with AdSense displays, making it difficult, if not impossible, to use RSS for content for your Web site. Back to the drawing board, right? Nope, not yet. One way to get around those display issues is to use an RSS script that allows
you to add the feed to your site and to change the way it’s displayed. RSS scripts, such as the RSS Equalizer (http://milleniumb.rssalizer.hop.clickbank.net), CaRP (www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp), and FeedForAll.com’s PHP script (www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.
htm), make it possible for you to grab RSS content and display it more effectively on your Web site. For example, if the script converts your RSS feeds to HTML, you can add articles to your site without ever even logging on. And best of all, you can also place AdSense ads around and within those articles. So now you not only have automatically updated content, but you also have
content with AdSense ads. Life’s good! A word about “baiting”
If you’ve read a bit about Web marketing here and there, you may have come across link baiting. Link baiting is the creation of an article that’s so unique or interesting that people, because of its content, want to link to it. Link baiting can be a good tactic for driving content to your site, which of course, will drive up your AdSense revenues. But to be successful, you have to make your link bait fun, informative, or creative — and it still has to be quality content.
The link bait has a dark side, too. When content is gimmicky, misleading, and unrelated to the content of your Web site, it can get you into trouble with Google. For example, if you place a gadget on a page of your site with the specific intent of drawing users to your site, and that gadget isn’t directly related to the site’s content, you’re skirting on the dark side of link baiting. Users may come to download that gadget, but they’ll be disgusted that your site
isn’t relevant to their real interests, so they’ll go somewhere else. After a while, even Google’s crawlers will realize that the increase in traffic to your site is only superficial. After they do, your ranking in search results will be penalized and your site traffic will drop dramatically. Misleading link baiting is expressly forbidden by Google, and because it’s become such a popular
way to drive Web site traffic, Google has developed some new ways to judge whether you’re using link baiting tactics. Nothing’s wrong with adding a bit of fun or creative content to your site, just make sure you create it within the guidelines that Google has established.
(Need a refresher on Google’s guidelines? You’re in luck. That section is coming up right . . . now!)
